You’ve built a team to run your business, but everything still ends up back with you. How do you get your team to take ownership of problems?
You’ve tried delegating, but you still end up doing most thing yourself because it’s quicker, or you find yourself fixing it afterwards, because it wasn’t handled right.
This is common, and when you look at the way the business is structured, rather than the people in it, the problem turns out to be different from what you expect.
The problem isn’t that the team are failing to step up, it’s that the business was never built in a way that lets them.
Why this happens
In the early stages of your business, you make most of the decisions, as you’re the most qualified person to make them and because speed is important. Clients are won and served through your personal involvement and relationships. Problems are solved when you are involved, and this is normal in the early stages.
But, as the business grows, the habits don’t change. You keep making the decisions because that’s the pattern that has been established. The team keeps escalating things to you, because that’s the way it’s always been. Every time you step in to sort something out quickly, the message it sends it: bring things to me and I’ll handle them.
Over time, a capable team learns to not make decisions. Not because they can’t, but because the system they are working in doesn’t ask them to. They’ve learned to check first, so they check. So you keep asking how do you get your team to take ownership?
This is a structural problem, and structural problems need structural solutions, not motivational ones. Giving a speech about taking more ownership, without changing the way the business runs, won’t change anything.
Four things that make a difference
Clear decision rights
Most businesses haven’t taken the time to set this out. People know what their job is, but they don’t know what they’re authorised to decide without having to check first. So when something comes up, they check with you.
Write down who can approve what, up to what value, and in what situation. Make it specific enough that it is useful, and give people authority within it.
When someone knows that they’re authorised to make a decision, they make it. If the boundaries are vague, they will continue to bring things to you. This is the same ground covered in the systems article, How To Document Business Processes, because decision rights are both a systems issue and a team issue.
Accountability over permission
In a permission culture, people will ask before they act. In an accountability culture, people act and then they report back. If your team is coming to you for approval before they make a decision, you’ve got a permission culture.
For this to change, you need to stop granting permission and start asking for outcomes. This is a lot harder than it sounds, because it means you sitting on your hands when someone brings you a decision and asks: what do you think we should do? You have to let them decide on the action and then, let them do it.
Tolerance for things being done differently
Teams won’t develop ownership if they handle something in a way that differs from how you would have done it, only to find out that you have corrected or overridden their decision. They need to be able to make judgment calls, to get them wrong, and learn from their mistakes, without it being treated as a problem.
If the expectation is set as “do it the same as I would”, the team will keep bringing decisions to you. Not because they’re lazy or don’t want to make decisions, but because it safer for them to check with you. A wrong call they made on their own is their fault, but if they checked with you first, then it’s shared. This structure has created the wrong culture.
A regular rhythm
Hold a weekly team meeting, to look at progress, problems, and priorities, instead of a meeting that concentrates on updates and approvals. This will change how your team operates, and creates accountability without requiring you to be constantly available. People will learn that they can do things, without stopping to ask you every time something comes up.
It also gives you visibility of what’s going on, without direct involvement. You can see what’s being done, what’s stuck, and where your input is needed, instead of being pulled in on every decision throughout the week.
Can your business work without you?
Take the Business Dependency Test.
It takes less than 3 minutes and will give you a clear answer.
The Hardest part isn’t the design
Most business owners can see the logic of this. The structure makes sense and the four things outlined above, are not complicated ideas.
The hard part is holding back after the structure has been put in place. Watching someone handle a client situation in their way, instead of how you’d handled it. Letting a decision go through that you’d have made differently. You need to learn to trust the process instead of the outcome of every individual moment.
That requires restraint, especially if you’ve built the business on the quality of your own judgment. Doing this creates the space for the team to grow. Without it, the old habits will return. The team will discover if the new way of working is real and is going to stay, or if you will step back in the moment it counts.
This is connected to the key person risk covered in The Key Person Risk Nobody Talks About. A team that steps up, is the most effective way to reduce owner dependency, and owner dependency is one of the main things buyers look for. The two conversations are the same conversation, from different sides.
What you’re building towards
Are you building a business where your involvement is a choice, rather than a requirement. Do you want things to be done well because the system supports them and the team is capable, or because you are watching every step.
That kind of business is better to run day to day, and it’s easier to scale. When the time comes, it’s also a lot easier to sell.
Buyers are looking to buy the future performance of the business, not its history. A business that has a team that runs things without you in the room, is very different from a business where everything stops when the owner is on holiday. What Buyers Look For In A Business covers exactly what that looks like from the buyers side of the table.
What’s one thing you could stop doing this week that would require your team to handle it themselves?